Inside The Revolutionary Lineage That Led to Tupac

If you had to pick a single person to represent the entirety of late 20th-Century America, you could do a whole hell of a lot worse than Tupac Shakur. He was raised in the rubble of the revolution, the son of Afeni Shakur, a legend in her own right. Born in Lumberton, NC, where as a child she learned the meaning of community-driven resistance through the local Lumbee Indian tribe’s heroic efforts to expel the KKK from the area, Afeni moved with her parents to New York in the late ’50s, growing up to become an influential member of the New York City chapter of the Black Panthers, engaging in then-groundbreaking work providing services to the community in the place of a borderline-absentee local government. What elevated her to folk hero status, however, was the fact that she successfully defended herself in court — while pregnant with Tupac — from trumped-up terrorism charges brought by a corrupt law enforcement establishment against the so-called Panther 21. 

Pac’s stepfather, Mutulu Shakur, pioneered the use of acupuncture as a methadone alternative for heroin users (it was the ’70s) and was also part of a crew of revolutionaries who sprang Assata Shakur from prison, earning himself a spot on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list as a result. Tupac spent his childhood bouncing around with his mom from New York to Baltimore and the Bay Area, attending arts high schools while dealing firsthand with the realities of urban poverty and the crack epidemic; as a young adult, he split his time as a touring backup dancer and roadie for the canonical dance-rap group Digital Underground (listen to Sex Packets, people!) and jetting to Atlanta to serve as the chairman of the revivalist New Afrikan Panther Party. 

Until finally, he became Tupac Tupac, he of the dorm room posters and the All Eyez on Me and the East Coast/West Coast beef and hip-hop crossover moment Juice and whatnot. Initially a political rapper, he became increasingly misunderstood by the press until he finally gave in and embraced his outlaw side, lapsing deeper and deeper into darkness until he was killed in a 1996 shooting that, along with the murder of the Notorious B.I.G. shortly thereafter, represented a true schism in hip-hop culture. The hope, the rise, the turmoil, the fall — Pac jammed so much into his short life that you can find anything you need within his story. Also, he was a commie.

If that particular detail interests you, then you will absolutely love the Irish hip-hop journalist Dean Van Nguyen’s new book Words for My Comrades: A Political History of Tupac Shakur. The book traces the late rapper’s roots, starting with his parents’ experiences as part of the revolutionary movements of the ’60s and ’70s, before examining the rapper’s own emergence as a radical force both within and outside of music, and ultimately looking at Shakur’s rise to stardom, the tumultuous final years of his life, and how his ghost still reverberates throughout the world. Van Nguyen is honest about his Tupac fandom, but objective and unsparing about the aspects of Tupac’s life and persona that deserve criticism. The book is exhaustively reported and researched, featuring countless interviews with surviving members of the Black Panthers who were his parents’ contemporaries, as well as rappers and producers who were around Tupac at pivotal moments in his life. 

This spring, I spoke to Van Nguyen about Tupac’s global appeal, what it must have been like to grow up among people who were targets of the state, Suge Knight as Tony Soprano precursor, and what Tupac might be like if he were alive today. 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

You’re an Irish music journalist, and Tupac is the ultimate symbol of American hip-hop. What about Tupac and his story resonated with you?

The book was always driving towards the question of “Why is Tupac such a global symbol?” He’s transcended the music to become this symbol of revolution on almost a Che Guevara scale. When you see Tupac's image, it evokes a certain feeling of resistance or rebellion. And I've seen that in Ireland, too. I was in school in the late '90s, early 2000s, and Tupac was the one artist who resonated with everyone. 

So it was always kind of like driving to that question of why and how it came to be. I understood that this was partly a result of his Panther background, like the idea that he's of this revolutionary lineage.

One thing that struck me when reading the book was the realization that America has this very short memory. People forget that in the late ’60s, early ’70s, there were real revolutionaries in America. We sort of paper over this stuff and sanitize the key figures in the movement, including people around Tupac’s parents, both morally and politically. Meanwhile, Ireland doesn’t do that in the least — it’s actually examined and internalized as part of your history. 

I think that’s why Tupac resonates amongst a lot of people in places like Ireland. We have a history of resisting colonization and rebellion, while the US has a ludicrously stable political history in terms of how it treats the Constitution as a set of codes to live by rather than something that should be malleable.

I think that Tupac being in the lineage of the Panthers is something that on a surface level enhances his iconography, but what I really thought was important to get into in the book is what that actually meant. We’ve boiled the Black Panthers down to the leather jackets and the fist in the air and the guns, and what gets left out is that they were this overtly Marxist movement. They were in league with organizations of all races — they saw capitalists as the oppressors and the global proletariat as their kin. It was important to me to tell their stories. Most of the surviving Panthers now are quite elderly. I really got a great sense from talking to them and other revolutionaries of their era that there was a real motivation to get their stories out there as much as possible. I think a lot of them have resolved that they’re not going to go to jail for telling a lot of this stuff. 

It’s also important to know that Tupac grew up in the aftermath of the revolution that never came. The crushing of the spirit of the sixties and early seventies left a real hardship on that generation of activists. I think Tupac would have grown up in this era of regret and bitterness — a lot of his mother’s comrades were in prison or had been killed by the authorities. I think that this really shaped his outlook. When he came of age, he wasn’t simply looking to bring the Panthers’ message to the forefront; I think he inherently knew that he needed to update that messaging for the nineties and saw rap music as a great way of doing that. Not just in terms of verbally getting his message across in his music, but in terms of how much rap music scared the establishment. It was a great way of striking back at the authorities and the power structure. 

From reading your book, it feels like Tupac was this throughline of American history. His and his family’s story touches on everything from the Lumbee Indians to the Panther 21 and his stepfather’s role in Assata Shakur’s prison break, then the crack epidemic, the commercialization of hip-hop, and all these different cultures and regions that Tupac spent time in as a kid. It feels like he was this genuine product of the arc of history, and his life plays out almost like that arc in miniature. 

It really is this incredible fifty or sixty-year saga of two generations of this family. They’re not only very directly involved in this period of history, but their lives intersect with so much. One of the things that influenced that was the documentary series OJ: Made in America, which while telling the story of OJ Simpson’s life is able to tangentially tell the story of the second half of 20th-century Black American history. 

I was talking to people he went to school with for the book and I mentioned Mutulu, his stepfather who was at the time on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list. I asked one woman if she knew that at the time and she was like, “No one had any clue.” It was just part of this extraordinary life he led from such a young age. It was such an interesting and wide-spanning story to try and tell. The themes just kind of slot into place in terms of the story.